On 05/04/2023 20:38, Simon Glass wrote:
Hi Neil,
On Mon, 3 Apr 2023 at 19:31, Neil Armstrong neil.armstrong@linaro.org wrote:
Hi Simon !
On 01/04/2023 20:54, Simon Glass wrote:
This shows how binman can be used to replace the long and complicated instructions with an automated build. It is still complicated to read but users don't have to worry about the details.
It needs some tidying up and only supports Odroid-C2 at present.
Like the v1, the work is really nice, but the dependency on vendor binary-only tools doesn't make feel confident about merging this.
So long as we can download it from somewhere, that is OK, or at least better than nothing. Is there a standard download location for the tools?
There's no "official" location, historically the tools was shipped with the buildroot fork in the u-boot sources, but it has been moved into different repos now they do not ship buildroot anymore, and we can only find those tools on the SBC vendor u-boot sources.
And the tools have the same name but only support different SoCs, there's no versioning, licence nor documentation... so relying on those tools is a nightmare.
This is why we made a central repository with the tools + binaries for each board with an easy script to generate the bootable binary: https://github.com/LibreELEC/amlogic-boot-fip and documented at: https://u-boot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/board/amlogic/pre-generated-fip.html
We have open source implementation for all boards, but still dependeing on tools we must manually build isn't optimal.
What would be optimal would be to re-implement those tools into python libraries and merge them into the u-boot tree then use them from binman.
Or C, perhaps? Then binman can call the tools.
Yes, but the open source tools aren't heavily maintained, have different ABIs...
Supporting GXBB and GXL/G12A is impossible, the binary format is totally different for example so we should import 2 different tools.
But this could be merged as first step, them the python libaray could be modified to support the binary tools & a probable python re-implementation.
Yes I think it would good to get this in, even if it only supports a few boards. It is easy to add more, when possible.
If this can rely on the amlogic-boot-fip repo, then why not, then we can find a native solution to replace calling those tools.
Thanks, Neil
Regards, SImon